Snakes in a Buildpack: Deploying Data Science in Cloud Foundry

Snakes in a Buildpack: Deploying Data Science in Cloud Foundry

Ian Huston & James Wen, Pivotal

Presented first at CF Summit Frankfurt 2016

The Cloud Foundry Buildpacks team set out on a journey in February to go where no official buildpack has gone before: Data Science. Working with those most elusive creatures, data scientists, we toiled in the deepest darkest crevices of our stacks and buildpacks to find a way to easily support the PyData ecosystem. We discovered a package manager called Conda and migrated it to the buildpacks’ zoo, where it now lives in glorious captivity.

Join us as we share our story with you! From idea inception to experiment after experiment after experiment after… you get the idea. We’ll share our initial working hypothesis and subsequent surprising discoveries, dive into the innards of buildpacks and stacks and detail what it was like working with the Pivotal Data Science team as our first customer. Finally, we’ll `cf push` a python data science app with no vendored dependencies!

About Ian Huston
Ian Huston is a Senior Data Scientist at Pivotal Labs. Before joining Pivotal, Ian used Python to create and destroy baby universes inside numerical simulations of the inflationary phase of cosmology.

About James Wen
James Wen is the Team Lead (Anchor) of the Cloud Foundry Buildpacks team at Pivotal in New York City. He currently maintains and works on the Cloud Foundry system buildpacks, buildpack tooling, stacks, and the extensive automation behind it all. In his free time, James serves as a core maintainer and contributor to Bundler and also loves to rock climb, whether on plastic or real rock.